Branchtender's Adventures in the Wasteland
by Will Freedom
Summary: Branchtender Linden is not merely an ex-Brotherhood Outcast helping protect Oasis; he's as close to a philosopher-poet as the Wasteland gets. After an equally eloquent LW leaves, his life goes up in flames and he sets out to save a child...or avenge her.
1. Mirelurks Rarely Merely Lurk

If only they knew what I really do for them.

Slogging through icy, irradiated water, cradling my Infiltrator like a child - an infinitely precious child that my life depends upon - in my arms, I reflect on the nature of responsibility, and of the strange processes we go through that change us. Or that force us to change ourselves; I haven't decided which.

Funny how philosophical I get when I'm in mortal danger.

I can hear one up ahead; at least I hope it's only one. With their creepy carapacial clicking, you rarely can tell for sure. Another two infinitely slow, patient steps, and I'm out of the water, sheltering behind a curve in the tunnel around which I can peek and see...one Mirelurk. Now that I have a good view of the miniature cavern it's in, I can be quite sure there's just the one. Mirelurks are rarely content to merely lurk.

Mirelurks rarely merely lurk.

What an interesting turn of phrase. Almost worthy of a poem, as is the way I kill it, stepping smoothly out, already shouldering my weapon in a movement so ingrained it's practically an autonomic response, aiming, tracking the rear curve of its carapace as it turns towards the sound of my boot coming down, waiting for the perfect moment I know is coming. As it sees me and pushes off its back leg to build up momentum to slam into me with, its face briefly comes up almost perfectly square to me, and I squeeze a three round burst right through that poorly armoured face and into its brain. The clatter as it falls is the loudest sound yet to echo off these dripping walls, and I freeze, waiting for a sound that indicates more are on the way.

A slow count to a hundred and twenty and I relax a little. Harvest the meat, rinse and repeat.

Three more dead Mirelurks and I've reached my goal. One of the larger pools in this old mine is deep enough for them to gestate their physically disgusting yet astonishingly tasty egg clusters. They keep setting it up; this is the third time I've destroyed this one. They breed like...something pretty fecund. As I harvest as many eggs as I can carry for my beloved, that crazy phrase keeps going around in my head. Mirelurks rarely merely lurk.

I want to laugh at the absurdity of it, but absurd or not, it's true, and what I'm seeing down here is seriously depressing me. My secret visits to the cave are becoming more and more frequent and yet every time I come, they're ahead of where they were before. What are they eating, how are they breeding? Soon this will become too much for one man to contain. My love is the only one who knows what I do down here, though I think Leaf Mother Laurel suspects.

Sometimes I fear that my life is like the life cycle of a creature I saw once, in a pre-war book far away. It was called a butterfly, and it started life as something like a green worm with hundreds of legs. After going around for a while eating greenery (for all the world was green back then, not just our too-small corner of it) it would spin a chrysalis around itself and gestate for a time, then emerge as this beautiful winged creature.

I used to think that my life was akin to that creature's life cycle, and it gave me comfort. I used to think my time with the Brotherhood was like the caterpillar, and the Outcasts like the chrysalis, and that the Deathclaw had ripped me out of it and sent me to this beautiful place where I could live as a butterfly with the love of my life.

Now I fear I'm still in the chrysalis.

What is to become of us?


	2. A Frail Cocoon

Nobody's around to see me emerge from the caves, shed my armour and stash it in its usual place, for which I am even more absurdly grateful than usual. In my current mood, lurking just inside the mouth of the derelict mine waiting around for somebody to leave would be sheer torture. Slinging the sack full of Mirelurk meat and eggs over my shoulder, I set off for the grove I share with my love.

Half a dozen steps, and I'm brought up short by a voice.

"Do you dress like a monster so the monsters will let you through?"

Just for a second, I shut my eyes and pretend that none of this is happening; then I open them, plaster on a smile, and turn to face Sapling Yew. I go down on one knee so I can better look her in the eye. It's no use dissembling; she's obviously seen everything. Best to just hit her with the truth and try to persuade her it's best nobody else knows.

"No, sweetie," I say, trying hard not to be overwhelmed by the surge of emotion that's trying to choke me. Such a smart kid...she deserves better than this. "I put that on to protect me from the monsters."

She thinks about this for a minute. "I saw you come out, last time. I couldn't sleep that night, so I went for a walk. I saw you coming out and I thought you were a monster." She shivers. "But then the monster started coming apart and you came out, so I didn't know what to think. So I went and asked Harold."

I close my eyes again, but she keeps talking, inexorably scoring my warm, safe cocoon. She'll make me come out...

"Harold said I shouldn't draw any con-clue-shuns. But I don't know what one of those looks like, so I couldn't draw it anyway. So I thought I'd just ask you."

I find my voice. "You didn't tell anybody else?" She shakes her head and I heave a sigh of relief. "Okay, sweetie. You're such a brave, clever girl that I'm happy you discovered me. But it's important, it's so important, that nobody else knows, okay? This has to be a top secret thing, just between us. Do you understand?"

She nods, solemnly. My heart is squeezing inside my chest, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. I'm manipulating a nine year old girl, but at the same time I'm so impossibly proud of her. I wish there was more I could do, for her, for all of them.

"Maybe there's a way you can help me. What I'm doing down there, it's so important for us up here. The monsters, they're..." I trail off, realizing that the whole truth would terrify her. "They're really good to eat," I finish lamely. "And you know how badly we need the food." I heft the sack. "Branchtender Maple finds ways to sneak this into her soups and stews, so you can grow up big and strong, and so the rest of us can stay healthy. But if the others knew what I was doing, they'd say it was too dangerous. They'd stop me, and we'd all go back to being hungry most of the time. So from now on, I need you to be my Initiate. Whenever I go down there, you scout it out up here, and if somebody comes, try to distract them or lead them away somehow so I can leave the cave unseen. Can you do that?"

She nods again, eyes wide. "Sounds like fun. Let me know, okay?"

Without any further ado, she skips off towards the main glade. I watch her go with admiration in my eyes and shame in my heart.

Comes a voice from behind me once again. "That was well done, husband."

Have my warrior instincts been so eroded, that I can be snuck up on twice in ten minutes? Frustration nudges me, but I suppress it, and turn to face my love. Maple is so beautiful; the sight of her always calms me. I leave the sack where it is and rush to embrace her. I kiss her neck, her ear, and murmur into it, "You think so?"

She pulls her ear out of my reach, giggling, and looks me square in the eyes. "I know so. Come on, let's make some soup."

I heft the sack over my shoulder again. It seems lighter this time. Maple takes my free arm, and we walk through the green to start the cooking process together.

My cocoon is intact, for now.


	3. A Dream of Blood and Green

**Acknowledgement (now that I've figured out how to do this): MAD props to CalliopeSpeaks88 for inspiring and encouraging this; it really wouldn't exist without you. Gratitude.**

**Chapter III: A Dream of Blood and Green**

In the dream, I'm back in the glade right before my initiation ceremony, talking to Treefather Birch. I'm still injured, still weak and forced to walk with the aid of a stick Cypress made for me; the Deathclaw had hit me hard enough to tear my chestplate right off and score deep into my flesh, damaging my insides. He tells me again that I'm still not beyond the risk of dying from blood poisoning and I should wait until I'm stronger to leave. Sunlight falls through the leaves so green, making dappled patterns of light and shadow on our faces, and somewhere in the distance, a child is singing.

But our gazes are locked in what is not quite a battle of wills; I meet his eyes squarely. "I'm resolved to do this. Bloomseer Poplar told me...some very interesting things." I sigh. "She also said some things I don't understand at all. But that's her way, isn't it?"

He smiles faintly. "As is her caution not to tell others what she prophecies about you, for fear they will alter what she wants you to do. Forget Poplar for a moment, and think of Maple."

"The girl who came to visit me the other day? What about her?" Far away, some part of me twitches in my sleep, wondering what kind of fool I used to be.

"The remarkable woman who radically altered her behaviour patterns by leaving the gate unguarded for a few moments in order to check on the well-being of a stranger. What about her is that I can almost certainly say that if you choose another path, if you stay here and become a Branchtender, like her, she will fall in love with you." Above us, the leaves continue to rustle gently in the faint breeze, indicating that the world has not, in fact, stopped dead at this bizarre pronouncement.

I stare at him incredulously. "Are you serious? Are you offering me that girl as some kind of love slave? I know you want me to stay here, but that's just sick."

He stares at me with just as much contempt; more, even. "I find that just as repulsive as you do! No, you young fool, I'm saying that young woman has already started to fall in love with you based on the qualities you have displayed. Your honour, your valour, your struggle to survive such a grievous injury. We all respect you, but she is attracted to you."

I still sympathize with my struggle to find the right words. "I don't...I can't just walk in here and take the only marriageable female in your tribe..."

"TRIBE?!?" The old man takes a half step forward, raising his staff and straightening his spine; despite myself I flinch a little. "We are no tribe! We are the world!"

"What my husband means to say," says Leafmother Laurel, coming up behind me, "is that nothing you could possibly do out in the Wastes is as important as what we need from you right here. Look around you! Green and growing things, like you'd find nowhere else, defended only by two able-bodied people, three elders, and a child. What may or may not pass between you and Maple is beyond irrelevant, and my husband should never have brought it up."

Birch smiles tolerantly. "Young people deserve happiness. I've planted a seed."

Leafmother Laurel smiles tolerantly and opens her mouth to speak, but whatever she was about to say is drowned by the blood, so much blood gouting from holes in her neck, her chest, and then the Deathclaw swipes its other hand at Birch, who raises an arm in a hopeless attempt to ward it off, and almost instantly loses the arm, falls screaming, clutching at the stump which is bleeding his life away into the ground and I pause to marvel at how he will now nourish one of the trees he loves so well while the Deathclaw turns its attention to me, its huge head turning from side to side to regard me balefully as it raises a huge clawed hand from which a single drop of blood falls and hits me right in the nose, and I wake up.

It takes me a moment to realize that the screams I'm still hearing are coming from me.

Maple is holding me, rubbing my back, using her other hand to try and stifle my screams so I don't wake up everybody in Oasis. "Baby, baby, hush, my darling, it's okay, you're safe, I love you," she's saying, over and over again. I take several deep, shuddering breaths and feel my heart rate start to return to normal.

"There was...a Deathclaw, and it..."

"I know, baby. It killed everybody. This always happens when you get back from the caves. I want you to stop going. You're still traumatized."

I pull back a bit to look her in the eye. "I can't stop. We need the food."

"We can do without it," she whispers. "I couldn't bear to lose you. Think about how you'd feel if you lost me."

"Snivelry," I whisper, but without much heart. I turn my face and kiss her, realizing that she's right, that the greater part of me would die without her. I can feel a growing tumescence, and she giggles as she feels it too, and reaches for it.

"Promise me," she whispers, as our breathing quickens as one and I roll on top of her. "Promise me you won't go so much. You've raided so many egg caches that surely they must be broken by now."

Arousal flees; I roll back onto the ground. Inexplicably, I start crying. I've been lying to her to protect her delusions, protect the illusion that this place - however beautiful and magnificent and necessary it may be - isn't doomed. And all of a sudden, that lie sickens me.

"My love," I whisper to her. "A Mirelurk nest could be broken like a Flamer catamite and still be dangerous. The cache I've been raiding has been the same one every time. They keep filling it up, adding more eggs, breeding like I know not what. I simply didn't have the heart to tell you." I wipe away a tear. "All I've been doing is fighting a delaying action, preventing them from overpopulating the caves, bursting up here, tearing down that fence and eating us all."

She doesn't say anything for a long time. I can't see her face in the darkness, but I know what her expression must be like. In my mind I can see her strong jaw clench as she resolves herself and says the words I'm expecting and dreading.

"Then we shall have to see what more we can do about them, won't we?"


	4. The Ecstasy of Extropy

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don't awaken alone.

Maple is almost obsessively diurnal, and I've always been more of a night person. Usually, she's wide awake and moving about at first light, while I sleep in. This has allowed us to keep an alert watch on the green more thoroughly, in addition to Cypress, who seems to get by on barely half a dozen catnaps a day.

But this morning, our limbs are still entwined; her sweet-smelling blond hair is tickling my nose, and her piercingly green eyes are open, watching me; a look I know all too well, for too often I wear it looking at her, while trying to memorize every detail of her face...her full lips, smiling that sweet, wry smile at me, her cute little nose...I banish the look, smile at her, and she raises a hand to caress my cheek. "I love you," I whisper.

She winks at me, and smiles back, but I who know her so well catch the touch of sadness she tries so hard to suppress. She takes a deep breath. "Whether it be of this world or of that...thy love shall lead thee yonder at the last," she says.

I'm finding it hard to breathe suddenly. Chills run up and down my spine and then spread out to suffuse my skin. I've finally realized something profound.

Life is special. Life finds a way to survive, to spread itself further. Life on this planet was almost eradicated, and yet it's finding a way to struggle back to itself. We see it with Harold, and with those of us who consider him a god. The purpose of life is to serve life itself. None of us are particularly bound to this place; we each stay for our own reasons, and some of us need to rationalize it by contorting our minds in such a way as to allow us to think a man with a tree growing out of his head is a god, but we stay, and we tend to the green, as we tend to each other. Harold didn't have to let Bob grow, and he certainly didn't have to let him root, knowing he'd never move again, but he did, because he knew it was important somehow.

I can't imagine how he must suffer.

But life is about love, about loving life so much you'd do whatever it takes in its service.

And life is stronger when more of its strands are bound together, fighting the good fight (as the strange person who has so recently come back into reception range of my suit's helmet radio likes to put it) against inexorable entropy. If one must die, then it is best to die in that cause, fighting so that somebody or something worthwhile can survive. Creating inexorable extropy.

Feeling good, and nearly optimistic for the first time in weeks, I stretch thoroughly and spring to my feet, casting off our blanket. I smile broadly at my wife, who is calmly chewing a piece of Mirelurk meat. "Let's fight the good fight, my love," I say to her.

"Put your pants on first, babe, lest the rest see that Yew's not the only sapling around here," is her only comment.

"Wench," I call her, but with affection, as I do as she bids. She smiles, blows me a kiss, and turns away, still munching her breakfast. I watch in admiration as she grabs her assault rifle, checks it, and slings it over her shoulder in one smooth motion. Her long-limbed stride carries her quickly off towards the front gate, knowing that I've got her back, that I will fight to the death to allow her to live, but never again without her full knowledge, consent...and participation.

Smiling to myself, I launch into my morning workout, tossing off pushups almost effortlessly.

**Author's Note: Extropy is a real word, despite having been underlined by the site with one of those red squiggly lines I so despise. It is, in fact, the tendency of things to grow and change, therefore it is the opposite of entropy. You may freely use this word...unless you mean to use it as the name of your band. This you may not do, for it is already the name of MY band. In that respect, it is mine, and you can't have it. =)**


	5. A Hunt With the Wife

It's not until much later in the day – after I've even started allowing myself to hope maybe it won't happen today – that the moment I've been dreading finally arrives.

I must admit, she acts it out with such nonchalance that I myself am fooled, despite being aware and terrified of the reality of it. She intends to go down into the caves with me. But she walks up to me with her usual catlike stride, sexy beyond all belief simply because she doesn't try to be, and looks deep into my eyes, and says, for the benefit of anyone listening, "Come, my warrior, and let your Valkyrie give you a rapid sort of earthly reward."

We're known for sneaking off for quickies at odd hours of the day. Even Harold knows this. He's nearby, out of earshot of a normal human, but who really knows how augmented his senses are? He's less human every day, and he doesn't much like discussing it. I think he now possesses senses that have no analog in human terms. Whatever they are, I can feel them focused on us. TreeFather Birch is also in the glade, kneeling before Harold, ostensibly communing with him, but I think he's trying to tune in too.

I stare pointedly at the hand she's caressing my chest with. "I'm a little preoccupied right now, my love," I say, as gently as possible.

She moves in closer, nibbles on my ear a little, and murmurs, "You're lucky I love you so much, you great idiot. You're not the swiftest metal barrel-dweller, are you?"

The words would be hurtful if they weren't uttered with such genuine affection. Sudden realization dawns in my mind, and despite my misgivings, I join the act, putting an arm around her and caressing her back, then giving her a spank and a kiss. She kisses me back and takes my hand; starts walking towards a particularly thick grove of trees that really is one of our favourite places.

"Yew's got most of them distracted, those who aren't on sentry duty. Now we've seeded an explanation for our temporary absence. Let's do this quickly."

I hesitate only briefly before replying. "What explanation have we seeded for one of us coming back injured? Or not at all?"

She grins at me. "Depends on the nature of the injury, doesn't it? But this same one should do!"

I laugh. I can't help myself. This must be what it is to laugh in the face of death. She can always do this to me, _always, _and she just proved it again, because never before has anything weighed so heavily on my mind.

"Now," she says, her tone abruptly serious as we reach the place where I stash my armour, "we discuss our strategy. I know you want to protect me, to keep me safe, but that won't always be entirely possible. I don't want you to allow a lurker to get inside your guard because you were shooting the one menacing me. I can take care of myself; I know their weak points as well as you do. I'll stay hidden more easily than you can too. I'll recon, in other words. You should bring the minigun."

I can't fault her logic, so I merely nod, and set about donning my power armour. Five minutes later, we slip through the gate in the chain-link fence and splash through the puddles in the entranceway, and I am hunting with my wife for the first time.

I've never particularly liked heavy weaponry. I've attained a certain level of proficiency with them; with chainguns and missile launchers and even the Fat Man I can certainly hit targets with the best of them – there's a trick to it – but I've always felt that such weapons lack elegance. You can't make up in force what you lack in finesse.

Still, when dealing with such heavily armoured creatures as Mirelurks, it can't hurt to tote along some extra firepower.

Maple slips along soundlessly, in comparison to my every armoured footfall. They sound maddeningly loud to me but are probably inaudible over the sounds of water dripping and trickling everywhere.

She halts, peers around a corner, signals me to wait. Enemy sighted; two of them. She readies my Infiltrator, and I pray the reliable silenced machine gun keeps her safe. She slips around the corner; I count slowly to ten and follow.

I have to duck my head to enter the chamber here, then straighten up, swinging the muzzle of the minigun to cover the two Mirelurks that were tending an egg cluster but are now straightening up as they see me. Maple is halfway around the chamber, hugging the wall. Of course they didn't notice her. I love a girl who is skillfully stealthy, I hum to myself, and open fire on the creatures, targeting their legs first. They love to build up momentum and charge into people, an attack which can easily break bones, smash ribs, damage internal organs, or crush a skull if the thing gets a lucky break.

One of them goes down, its left leg nearly severed. The other charges me, and I shift my aim, peppering its upper carapace which cracks but does not shatter. It plows into me, lifting me off my feet and depositing me in several inches of heavily irradiated water, and from far off I hear my love scream, but I'm too preoccupied with the damage reports in my helmet's heads-up display, and then the pain arrives. Through a pink-tinged fog, I see the Mirelurk raising its claw to hit me again.

Several impacts shatter the claw, and the Mirelurk utters an inarticulate howl and turns away from me, towards the source of this insult. My love. I get the minigun aligned on it before it can charge her, and fill it with enough 5mm bullets to stop a Deathclaw.

She runs up and kneels down beside me in the water. I wave her out of it, and somehow manage to start the struggle to my feet. I don't want her anywhere near this water; maybe it nourishes Bob, but that's Bob. It hasn't done Harold any favours, and a tiny flashing progress bar in my HUD tells me that it's not nurturing me any. What if we decide to have kids someday? What if we –

"MAPLE! DOWN!" I scream in horror, my mechanically enhanced voice booming out of the helmet and echoing off the rocky walls. To her credit, she demonstrates yet another reason why she is worthy of my love. Nine hundred and ninety nine people out of a thousand will, upon hearing a sudden command to duck, turn to see for themselves if the situation truly warrants it. Nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people out of a million may duck a little, maybe drop to one knee, but they'll still turn to look. And ninety nine times out of a hundred, they'll die.

Maple, being one in a million, throws herself flat, unquestioningly, and survives. The shimmering blue sphere of sonic force hurled by the Mirelurk King she had her back turned to passes directly through the space she was standing in. I return fire, targeting its head as best I can while rising from my sitting position to one knee, recalling from an old Brotherhood briefing that these things can't emit that scream if they've been hit in the head. My love is moving again, taking cover behind a stalactite. Stalagmite? Which ones go up and which come down again?

Who CARES, Branchtender! It's very nearly unbelievable, the trivial nature of the thoughts you're capable of allowing yourself to be distracted by during a firefight!

I know I'm stressed out when I start mentally lecturing myself. All right, enough of that; get your razor focus on. What if some of that stupid shit was your final thought? Concentrate on killing the Mirelurk King, and oh yes, nice shot!

With its mental focus thoroughly disrupted, the Mirelurk King leaps at us, arms spread and claw tips extended, ready to rend and tear us. My minigun tears through the last few dozen bullets in its clip, most of which hit but seemingly fail to slow it down, and runs dry with an ominous whining sound. I don't have time to reload – in seconds it will be on my love – so I toss it aside and launch myself into the thing.

Impact.

Mutant muscle flexes; claws scrabble on armour, seeking a weakness, a way to crack this metal carapace and extract the delicious (to a Mirelurk, I'm sure) flesh within, chunk by bloody chunk. Mechanically boosted muscle fights back, vies for supremacy.

I've got its number. Amazingly, it might just be the slightest bit stronger than even my Power Armour, but it doesn't actually know how to fight, no doubt relying on pure viciousness to maintain control of its kingdom. In addition, every now and then it twitches as a round from my Infiltrator slams into it, my love demonstrating her marksmanship and steady nerve.

I just have to keep it from making a break for it long enough to throw it to the ground and crush its skull under my knee, a maneuver I finally accomplish. Breathing heavily, I check the time elapsed in my HUD and discover that although it felt like half an hour, I actually only physically wrestled with the thing for less than a minute.

Maple is already hard at work with her hunting knife, carving off the best pieces of the beast and throwing them in the pack she brought for this purpose. I move over to the body of one of the others and start doing the same. We're both just about finished with our butchery when my suit's microphone, which I have dialed up to full sensitivity for just this purpose, conveys the sound of more Mirelurks approaching at speed. I hasten over to grab my minigun and Maple, who is already approaching the last corpse with a hungry look. I tell her we have less than thirty seconds to beat a strategic retreat which is a good idea because my suit needs some repairs and both of us could use a break from the monster hunting and slaying tonight. I feel extremely weary, but in a good sense, and I don't think anything is seriously injured, but there's no sense pushing our luck. I can't tell how many are approaching, beyond the fact that there's more than one.

Maple gives the last Mirelurk a regretful look, saws off the intact claw, and dashes for the exit. I follow, hoping the beasts don't follow us out into the green.

They do not, which is good for them, because they would have been gunned down by the ready weapons of everybody in the camp; they're lined up waiting for us to emerge.

Personally, I'd rather face their weapons than the looks on their faces.


	6. Accusations and Surprises

They all start talking at once, of course.

After a suitably long uncomfortable silence, which I spend mostly staring at the ground, the trees, and Maple - who naturally meets everybody's gaze like the champion she is - the clearing erupts in a clamour of voices, all strident or accusatory or otherwise upset with us. The comments that stick in my mind range from Cypress's outraged "Linden, what the _fuck?_" to Poplar's rather more ominous yet seemingly unrelated "The path is trodden best by the youngest, able to survive the culling. The monsters retreat if paid in blood and fire."

Finally, a child's voice, raised to that special level of ear-piercing frenzy that only children are capable of, shuts them up. "Stop it! This is why I didn't want to _tell you!"_

Having acquired everybody's attention quite effectively, Yew turns to us. "I'm sorry. They mostly knew everything, they just made me confri…comfort…"

"Confirm," says Leaf Mother Laurel, with her usual gentle smile that somehow, frighteningly, does not reach her eyes today. "We made her confirm that you two had really gone insane."

"What's insane about wanting to protect something you love?" whispers Maple, so quietly that I, standing beside her, barely catch it. I shrug resignedly and start divesting myself of my armour; now that the secret is out, hiding it will no longer be necessary. I'm relieved to see that it doesn't need anywhere near the amount of repair I thought it would.

"How the hell do you fucking figure you're protecting us, exactly?" If anyone among them was guaranteed to hear her from the twenty or so paces that separate us, it would have to have been Cypress. The man's ability to move silently is unmatched in anybody I've ever met, and he claims it's because he's good at listening rather than sneaking, but he's never elaborated beyond that; and now he and I may never have a civil conversation again. In fact, if he continues addressing Maple in this fashion, I may have to kill him, and the brotherhood of the trees be damned. I shift my pose slightly to try to indicate as much to him; he merely glares at me.

"While it is true that we cannot know what the monsters will do in response to an invasion of their lair, it is also true that we cannot fault the intentions of our brother and sister," intones Tree Father Birch, pouring on the wise old elder routine for all he's worth. "Having ascertained that they are not moving on us now, we must move this conversation to the grove. Harold wishes to take part in it."

"Fuck intentions," mutters Cypress. "You can pave over a lot of shit with intentions, but the shit's still the same, the destination's the fucking same, and oh, fuck me, there's a lot of suffering before you get to the end of that road, too. Go fucking figure." He turns on his heel and stalks off towards the grove, still muttering mostly profanities to himself. Poplar follows, seemingly unconcerned. Laurel and Birch are standing off to one side, clearly waiting for us to go ahead so they can have a quick quiet word together alone, so we head out.

Ordinarily, Sapling Yew would be skipping along at our heels, but she's caught the mood of the company, and, head down, she moves over to the other side of my love and reaches for her hand. Maple looks at me with that secretive smile I love so well, and grabs her hand. Then, just for good measure, she grabs mine with her other. She puts on a brave face, but I can tell when she's frightened; I didn't even need the confirmation provided by the way she squeezes me. My love has quite a firm grip actually. "She thinks she wronged us," she murmurs in my ear.

"I promise, I tried not to tell them," says Yew in a small voice.

"Oh, sweetie, you didn't do anything wrong. Please stop worrying," says my love.

"Everything is going to be fine, I promise," I add. "They're just mad because we tried to keep it a secret! And the fact that you knew is making them extra mad."

"I'm not a child," she says, giving me the resentful look reserved for adults who underestimate a child. "I know it's dangerous down there. I wouldn't go. I was scared when you guys came out. They're not mad 'cause of me knowing and being tempted to go. They're mad 'cause they think you'll stir the monsters up. I could of told them if the monsters would come they would of already, but I didn't want to say how often you go down there."

Maple bursts into tears.

I find my voice. "How often I…"

"Harold said I shouldn't tell you the real time I found out. He said it would hurt your warrior's pride and be bad for more-al. I said I didn't want to lie, because lying is bad, right? But Harold said just lying by a mission is okay sometimes, if it's to protect somebody. I don't know why you'd lie down on a mission but he said not to worry about it."

"Harold has a lot to answer for," says Maple, her voice still quivering, tears glistening on her cheeks.

"Lying by omission is exactly what we've been doing to everybody, my love," I say. "Honestly, I think I feel better already now that everything is out in the open."

"I don't," she replies. Her eyes meet mine for a long moment, and I'm struck yet again by how beautiful she is, even with her eyes all puffy from crying. My poor love. Less than half an hour ago, she had to watch me get hit hard by those fucking lurkers, and now she has to face the wrath of the camp…her whole family, essentially. Her world must seem like it's falling apart.

"Well, well, look at who it is," says Harold in his ponderously slow way as we arrive. I've never been big on talking to Harold, because even a simple conversation with him usually takes much longer than it should. I leave the dialogue to those who worship him, this strangely mutated man. He's more tree than man now, though, really. Now that I think on it, I really should have taken more time to talk to him, because what kind of man would undertake to do what he did? We humans are used to constant stimulation, activity, and he willingly gave all that up, sacrificed his humanity for the sake of this tree, and it repaid him by rooting him to the ground, making his features barely recognizable as human; what kind of strength of character would that –

"No, seriously, I'd like to look at who it is. Get around here." I'm shaken out of my reverie to realize that everybody has moved away from me, Cypress grinning sardonically and Maple studying me intently, as if she hardly knows me at all. Bloomseer Poplar has moved over to a small pool of water and is occasionally poking it and studying the ripples thus created, and Birch and Laurel are just catching up, but moving around so as to be within Harold's field of vision. Yew has climbed up and settled onto one of his branches.

"Most holy Harold," begins Tree Father Birch, "your humble worshippers beseech you for your counsel. Two of your Branchtenders have taken it upon themselves to put this settlement, this Oasis, at risk. They venture beneath the mountain and disturb the monsters there. They – "

"They're fine. It's not a problem," Harold interrupts. "Now I know better what's going on down there, I got Herbert to exert some influence – "

There is a familiar clicking sound. I reach around behind me for my Infiltrator, realize that Maple's still got it, and that all my other weapons are back in the other clearing, along with my armour. I'm soft and defenseless and the Mirelurks are _here._


	7. The Revenant's Revelation

***** People are reading this and not reviewing. I know my spelling and grammar is immaculate, but what do you think about the ideas, the style, the characters, the action? Come on, somebody say something, even if it's only 'good job' or 'you suck' - though if it's the latter I'd prefer just a hint of elucidation. Things are really gonna heat up after the Lone Wanderer rolls through. Anyway, on to the story:**

"Bob! You decaying, worthless, half-rotted, fungus-infested, miserably mean green bastard of a tree! Stop frightening the humans. Even if Linden's expression is, heh, pretty funny, it's not nice to do that to them." Harold's words seem to come from a great distance away, as there is a massive adrenaline surge coursing through my body, coupled with a sense of panic that's impeding my ability to think straight.

It's starting to sink in that we were never in any danger. Intellectually, I _know_ this. Physically, I'm still tweaked. In the corner of this grove, against the mountainside, there's a ten-foot high length of chain-link fence that I've never, until now, discerned a use for. All that's behind that fence is a pool of water that is fed by a trickle down the mountainside, and drains a similar trickle into a small cave that doesn't even look big enough for a Mirelurk to emerge from. Crouching down beside the fence, as near to the cave as I can get, I can hear the distinctive sound of a trudging Mirelurk or two in there. The noises are, however, receding, so I stand up and turn on Harold, red rage burning in my heart.

But standing between us is everybody I love in this world, and by the time I'm halfway back to him, the harsh words I plan to say are mostly gone, eliminated by the feelings of protectiveness I feel towards everybody here, even Cypress with his unquestioning worship of all things Harold and his derisive attitude towards everything else.

So I march back up to Harold and, with a reassuring wink to my worried-looking wife, calmly ask him, "Harold, what did you mean when you said stop frightening the humans?"

"Well, Linden, in case you hadn't noticed, Bob's a tree."

The rage I'd suppressed for the sake of my family threatens to break its bonds. I clamp down on it again. "Yes, Harold, I actually did. How is that relevant?"

Harold sighs. "It means he doesn't _think _like us. Human morals are irrelevant when they're not confusing him. Now, you and I have discussed how my perceptions are changing, but some of the others haven't, and it'll be a necessity soon, so it's good you're all here."

Maple is smiling in sudden comprehension as I turn to face everybody. Birch and Laurel have each got a hand on their daughter's shoulders, and the three of them are holding each other tightly. Cypress is, as usual, scowling, and Poplar looks like she's resigned herself to listen to something she already knows.

"Harold is connected to all the trees he's seeded," I tell them. "His awareness is spreading, but it's not like any of our senses. It's more like…auras, I think." Laurel bends over to whisper something in Yew's ear, and I give her a second to explain further before continuing. "Life force is now a tangible presence to him; for example, when we're all out in different parts of the camp, he knows who is where, and he can even sense a bit of their mood, just vaguely."

"The more trees I grow, the stronger it gets," adds Harold. "And now that I've focused my attention down below, I can sense the Mirelurks, but there's more. I can _influence _the Mirelurks."

Cypress' eyes are the size of Mirelurk eggs as he struggles to process this information. "Truly, I have chosen my god well," he whispers to himself.

Yew shrieks with delight. "Harold! You can control the monsters! _I love you!_"

My cautious delight over the thought of an army of Mirelurks scouring the countryside clean of Raiders is tempered by the knowledge that said army would be subject to the whim of Harold, and his next words do nothing to reassure me.

"I can't _control_ them, little one, any more than you can control the digestive bacteria in your intestines. It's a similar situation. I can influence their mood, though, and mostly, I have to rely on Bob to do the actual pushing. That's why I said they're not a problem. We just make them feel purposeful, motivate them to expand further into the caves, away from us. Discourage them from coming towards the outside at all!"

"So let me guess," says Maple. "The influence changed suddenly when you referred to Bob as Herbert, right?"

"Yeah," says Harold sheepishly. "When I say he's a tree, Linden, and he doesn't understand human morals, it's because things are different for him. The circle of life is all that matters. And, just as you don't have control over the life cycle of your stomach bacteria, Bob can't just kill off a Mirelurk somehow."

"But he can cause one to suddenly want to investigate the light coming in from that crevice over there, right? Harold…"

"What he did was more like tweaking their senses so they felt a vague sense of danger from that direction, and it wasn't specific to one creature. He had to influence several within a certain radius. But yeah…I guess you could say it was sorta like…why are you looking at me like that?"

"Harold. Please. For once. Think! What if Bob decides he'd be better served by an army of fast-breeding giant mutant crab things, rather than a bunch of non-renewable humans whose feelings he can't influence? You just as much as said outright he'd have no moral objection to wiping us out!"

Harold is quiet for a long moment, long enough for another, even more unsettling thought to occur to me. "That's true, right? He can't influence us that way, can he? Please tell me he can't manipulate our feelings."

"You tell me," says Harold. "Been having thoughts that didn't feel like your own lately? As for him deciding they'd make better servants than you, well, maybe you shouldn't have given him the idea!"

The look on my face must be something terrible to behold, because Maple is looking at me like she doesn't even know who I am. I take two paces forward and grab her hand. "Come on, my love, we're leaving. I'd rather take my chances in the wastes." She frowns but doesn't hesitate, opens her mouth but doesn't object, and releases my hand but follows closely.

Our ignominious retreat is stopped by Harold's strange-sounding slow hearty laughter. "Linden! Come on, please. For once. Think. Heh, see what I did there? I promise none of you are in any danger from Bob or the Mirelurks. I swear it. Bob loves you all; in his own way, he probably loves you more than I do."

"How immensely reassuring," whispers Maple to me, and despite myself, I choke on a laugh. Damn me but I love this woman. On some level, she's actually amused by the way this drama is playing out, and even saw an opportunity to lighten my mood slightly and took it.

It makes me wonder what I'd ever do without her. I acted without thinking a second ago, and it could have put her in the unenviable position of having to choose between me and Oasis. She's not like me; she didn't live much of her life in the Wastes. Furthermore, despite the fact that I've explained to her about the Forced Evolutionary Virus and what it's capable of, she leans more towards believing in Harold's – or Bob's – deityhood. Not with the ardent religious fervor of Birch or Cypress but closer to the quiet faith of Laurel. This place is her home in a way I envy.

But if our positions had been reversed, I'd have followed her in a heartbeat. Home is where your love is.

Fuck me. Maybe she did choose.

If so, she did it damn fast. Maybe she really does love me as much as she says she does! No, wait…she must have just reached the same conclusion I did regarding the relative merits of trusting Bob and Harold to mentally manage the Mirelurks. But if not, I just gave her an ultimatum! Fuck, an idiot! Fuckin idiot!

I need to focus. I'm thinking about this impossibly subjective hypothetical philosophical stuff when I should be paying attention to the interaction going on and preparing to lend an objective point of view.

"I like your faith in me, Laurel, but I'm not gonna be around forever. I keep telling you people, I'm fucking bored!" Harold is saying. He's been on this trip before. I remember admiring his strength of character – for letting himself be rooted to the ground – not ten minutes ago, and brush that aside. "What are you all gonna do when I'm gone and you can't communicate with Bob? Assuming he survives my brain-death, which I think he will, he certainly won't be the same."

I wonder how much of Harold's mentality Bob avails himself of. I've watched the man become steadily more tree-ish, but there's no good way to gauge how human the tree is.

I wonder how seriously Harold truly longs to die.

Cypress is saying something about how Harold's going to live a long and fertile life while he, Cypress, is still drawing breaths of fresh clean air (provided by Bob and his offspring) to protect him. Harold's only reply to this speech is a heavy sigh.

"You can't leave us, Harold," pipes up Sapling Yew. "I want to grow up with you and know you all my life. Dying on purpose would be selfish."

"It would be tremendously selfish," agrees her mother, Laurel. "You need to propagate, Harold, you and Bob need to spread your progeny and your influence across this Wasteland. You are producing cleaner air in here, and renewing a habitat for all sorts of creatures, some of which we can even eat."

"And some of which want to eat us," my love chips in, at once deflecting everybody's attention away from Harold's suicidal thoughts, but back to our perceived folly.

"If they can be held at bay," says Birch, "we can maintain here indefinitely. We can sustain ourselves with everything here. But if we go expanding, we risk being discovered by some of the less savory aspects of the society that's out there. We need to maintain the status quo!"

"Well, everybody can believe and hope for whatever they would like, but the decision ultimately isn't going to go to any of us," Harold tells us. A murmur of mixed shock and dismay runs through us; even I can't resist a startled "Huh?"

"That's right," he says into the sudden silence. "Another approaches, at my call. A girl with the weight of the wasteland on her shoulders will come. On her the decision rests. Even now she draws nearer, though she knows it not, and she will determine our destiny."

Maple turns a gaze of sheer panic on me and I instantly take the few steps to her and enfold her in my arms. I've never seen her so distressed. "Oh, my love," she whispers in my ear, and then, eerily, echoes my exact thought of the night before: "What is to become of us?"


	8. The Weight of the Wasteland

Another thing I love about Maple is this: she spends remarkably little time being distraught.

I've seen her flustered, certainly. Concerned, troubled, worried - but never panic-stricken. Agitated at most, I suppose. Hysteria doesn't seem to be a state she's capable of reaching, let alone sustaining. Today she's perturbed, for sure, but is genuinely trying not to let it affect her poise, and generally succeeding. She's been ostensibly working on a new shirt for me, but compared to her usual quick stitching, this one hasn't taken shape very quickly.

As night falls, her mood changes from despondent to analytical.

"What do you think Harold meant when he said 'she' was coming?" she asks me after a long companionable silence. We're sitting across a small fire from each other, in what everybody considers to be 'our' little grove. I've been fixing my armour while she sews.

"Best guess is much the same as yours, my love, and you know it."

She sends a wan smile over the fire at me. "I do, but I want to hear you say it, fool."

"You're the practical-minded one, baby, I'm just the cute poet you fell in love with." Ever so carefully, I reconnect two of the wires inside my helmet and snap the cover back over them. I can tell the HUD is working perfectly again just by looking into the thing. I can also feel her staring at me, and I know from long experience there's no point resisting further. "Oh, very well, wench," I say, meeting her eyes again and giving her a wink.

She almost laughs. "You always know how to lighten my mood, don't you baby? Come on, tell me."

I take a deep breath. "Well, it's like this. There's a woman out there – some do-gooder, no doubt, trying to set right some of the massive injustices of this world we live in – who is presumably wandering around, blasting radscorpions and just now getting close enough to this place that Harold can sense her aura through Bob, and he's either hoping she'll stumble across the entrance - though so few ever do – or he's deluded himself into thinking he can actually summon people and is having an influence on what direction she chooses to set off in each morning, and anyway once she's here then Birch will make her drink from the Basin, and while she's all tripped out and confused Harold can lay out his case for wanting to die, hoping she'll accommodate him. Sound about right?"

During my speech, she has set aside her work and now, before replying, she stretches, yawns, and lies down on the bedroll we share, still staring into the fire. "Yes. Listen, baby, if somebody does come, will you help me, please? Will you side with me, help me persuade her to do the right thing? Harold mustn't die, we have to keep him alive but just slow his rate of reproduction, just a little bit. Birch and I have a theory –"

"Gotta stop you there, my love. I don't think the trees should be slowed down at all. I think the Wasteland improves steadily the greener it gets."

"You don't!"

"I do. Unlike you, I actually lived in the Wastes for many years, and I can tell you with certainty that the world out there can only be improved by living trees. My only concern is that it will lead to increased contact with Wastelanders following the thickening foliage to our nest here."

"With Certainty, are you? Well, you and Certainty - that bitch - are welcome to each other. I'm going to sleep." She matches action to words almost instantly, leaving me sitting bemused, helmet in my lap. I love how she can really emphasize a word. I love how she's such an independent thinker. I love...a great many things about her.

I love how she falls asleep, starting with the little twitches of her extremities, and then her perfect lips part slightly as her breathing deepens. I even love the small puddles of drool she produces ever so discreetly. But at least I know how pathetic I am.

Now, the mention of the Basin of Purification has made me thoughtful…

It doesn't take much of the sap to get me high. Blissful euphoria suffuses every pore, and I dance to the music of the trees.

When I tire of this, I return to our grove, take out my book and an old pencil I found somewhere, and start to write.

_So many have tried; so few have survived_  
_you went to the well but it was poisoned_  
_There's a song in your heart that could tear me apart_  
_but you just want to make this endless noise end_

_It's a slow burn, and I'll take my turn_  
_while we wait within the eyes of the beholders_  
_A cold day in hell and I'm with you there as well_  
_we've got the weight of the wasteland on our shoulders_

_Innocence is a child forever sitting on the fence_  
_Young enough to see the world is getting colder_  
_And the people in it freeze to death cause they can't count on their friends_  
_though the weight of the wastes is on their shoulders_

_A cry for help or an assertion of an offensive defense_  
_the burning wastes get bold enough to merely smolder_  
_ascending to a moral turn enough to drive the Flamers hence_  
_and the wastes will soon be lifted from our shoulders_

_Pretense makes no sense; it's time to commence_  
_as I become the eye of the storm_  
_our extensive intellects must take the time to coalesce_  
_and you embody this essential elemental calm_

_but now the gulf between the stars is closer than our beating hearts_  
_our memories will take the blame as we get older_  
_the struggle to survive is all that's keeping us apart_  
_cause we've the weight of the wasteland on our shoulders_

I'm not a hundred percent sure I even like this one, but it's something I've written, and writings have been few and far between lately. I'll contemplate it sober sometime tomorrow. In the meantime, I really should do another circuit of the camp. It's very late, very quiet. The fire, which was never large - due to a lack of dead wood, ironically - has died down to a bed of red iridescence in the darkness.

My Infiltrator slung across my back makes me feel safe, comfortable. Usually. But something about the atmosphere tonight is making me feel uneasy. Not to belabor the butterfly metaphor, but I feel like if I was one, I'd be getting ready to leave the cocoon. My stomach rumbles - could this feeling just be hunger pangs?

No. The thought of food is not making me feel any better.

Cypress is on watch at the front gate. "Everything quiet?" I murmur to him as I pass by.

"Quiet enough. Through my sniper scope here, I saw a Deathclaw stalk a Yao Guai right past the entrance to our little walk-up, but neither of them so much as glanced in this direction. Even though I'm sure the Yao Guai smelled me. Thank Harold. Praise him, for he exerts his influence and keeps the monsters from our door."

"Indeed." I'm still not convinced. The Yao Guai was probably too intent on luring the Deathclaw into the ambush that it and several others of its kind had prepared. A single Yao Guai is usually not a match for a Deathclaw, but they are much, much smarter. I've seen it happen. But telling Cypress this is probably going to be counterproductive.

The explosion of snarling fury and eerie-sounding Deathclaw screams that erupts from what seems like just around the corner would have emphasized my words, though, if I had told him. He's gripping his sniper rifle anxiously, staring out into the darkness through the scope, which, like the one on my Infiltrator, has a light amplification ability.

The sounds of battle cease, to be replaced by the only mildly disturbing sounds of Yao Guai contentedly feeding. Definitely more than one. I smile in satisfaction. "Need a break, my friend?" I ask him.

He looks at me, eyes wide. "How did a Yao Guai kill a Deathclaw?"

I shrug. "With help from others of its kind. There's a lesson in there somewhere, probably."

He stares at me for a long moment. Finally, he sighs and drops his gaze. "Thank you, brother Linden. I could use a short break. Also, I apologize for my conduct earlier today. We are too few to fight amongst ourselves in such a way."

I nod in agreement, and he even smiles faintly, then turns away and heads into the camp. Men of few words but hidden depths, we.

At least my stomach feels better.


	9. Fear of Apocalypse is Playful Collapse

The fire is everywhere; ravenous, it devours.

It wants everything I have, everything I am except for me. It's in the glade, it's in my family and I can hear them all calling my name as they burn. It's all around me, but I'm cold, I'm so cold even this inferno can't warm me up. It won't burn me, because it doesn't want me.

I'm irrelevant. It only wants everything else, because all I am is my possessions, my armour and weapons, my book of poetry, my family…and my love.

She screams, reaching out to me as her soft, lovely flesh blackens and falls away from her bones, and I scream too, because I can't move, I'm completely immobilized because I'm ceasing to exist as the fire destroys all that I am, leaving behind only my body with a mind inside it that's not…quite…

"Linden. Linden. Linden. My love. Come back to me. Love, love, love, sweet my love, I'm here. Please wake up, open your eyes my love. It's just a nightmare." My beloved is sitting up, holding me, whispering these words of reassurance, cradling my head. My tears are soaking into her thin nightdress.

"I, I, I, I was stopping," I finally manage to say. "You were all burning and I didn't matter anymore."

"Put it behind you, my love. No!" she says, as I try to interject. "Leave it! Stop thinking about it, it wasn't real, and it doesn't matter. It can't happen. You're the most important person here, especially to me. I love you, baby. Oh my sweet baby. Hush now, relax, just lie here with me."

Long moments pass while my sobbing subsides. That nightmare was one of the worst I've ever had. Usually they just involve me being chased through various locations, or people I care about getting killed, mostly by Deathclaws. This is the first time my nightmares have been…metaphysical.

"Metaphysical, really, love?" Her beautiful face wavers between concern and sheer perplexity. I'm perplexed too, as I hadn't realized I was speaking out loud.

"I can't think of a better word for it, baby. It was bad precisely because it was so existential. Everything that made me a unique individual was burning, and I was unharmed, but at the same time I was ceasing to exist, even though I was physically present."

"A metaphysical nightmare; now I really have heard it all. What made it so bad, though?"

"It was…I think it was because it felt like all that mattered about me were my few possessions and my relationships with you and everybody else here…and those things seemed so trivial, so irrelevant as they were destroyed. My weapons and armour and all they symbolize and everything I've fought and nearly died for just melted. My book of poems and musings flaked to ash and blew away. And you, you…" My throat swells again, and my eyes fill up.

She waits patiently for me to finish, wipes my eyes on her dress.

"Our love seemed pointless at best and gratuitously selfish at worst, in a world such as this," I tell her, when I can speak again. "It felt like, this is what you deserve, but it doesn't even matter anyway. It's gotten me thinking about fortune and fate."

"Hummm…like how we make our own luck? And that qualifies as fate? I've always felt that destiny was something we could make for ourselves, within reason, and then I exceeded all my expectations by ending up here. I always wanted to see a forest, when I was little. I'd imagine all the blackened dead trees were alive and vibrant…" She trails off, a little sadly. One hand idly strokes my hair.

I sit up a little straighter, despite having greatly enjoyed her breasts pressed up against my face. They've played more of a role than anything else in calming me down after the nightmare. "You make your own luck, right? I've heard that expression before, somewhere. It always seemed reasonable to me, but then I'd keep encountering people who would bemoan their luck, and say they'd have no luck if they didn't have bad luck and things like that. But I always thought about the deeper ramifications of every decision we make in a day, and how even bad things we can't avoid can have positive benefits."

She smiles at me and leans her head forward until our foreheads touch, and we're looking each other eye to eye. "If you hadn't gotten mauled by a Deathclaw almost to death, we'd never have met."

"You understand perfectly. But it's even more profound than that, baby. All these experiences that shape us, make us who we are and hopelessly in love, it's like they're…inevitable, really. We're stuck in this Wasteland with nothing but our wits and our guns to keep us alive and we could succumb to a base nature but instead we rise above it and make our base in nature, or what comes close to passing for nature on this poor irradiated ball of dust. We are what we make of ourselves, and what we've made is actually pretty impressive, considering what we have to contend with."

A single tear escapes her left eye and rolls down her cheek as I make this speech; she makes no effort to brush it away. "So you think we have a life this good because we deserve it?"

My poor naïve love…I shake my head, smile back at her. "No. That's like saying bad things happen to bad people because the universe wants everything to even out. Karma is just wishful thinking. If that were the case, nuclear war wouldn't have happened. You can't tell me that everybody who got radiation poisoning deserved to die that way. No, I think we deserve this life because we worked for it. Luck played a factor, certainly, and for some more than others, definitely. But there's nothing profound about it."

She grins and wipes her tears away, reaches out a hand, strokes my cheek. "There's my skeptical love! Good morning! Are you hungry?"

I discover that I am, now my attention's been drawn to it. She hasn't waited for my response, as she knows me well. I watch her walk away, feel my heart brim with love for her, and wonder how much more I can take without breaking. Physical punishment is nothing. Night terrors are something. Peril to my love is something else again. And I can't help but fear that something much worse is in the works.

Will fearing further apocalypse cause me to collapse?


	10. What Comprises a Compromise

Lately, my love has discovered that the reed-like plants that grow so prolifically around the eastern pond are actually edible. To be more precise, they are edible if properly processed. Their leaves must be dried first, for which a day or two of direct sunlight usually suffices. Then they can be ground up with surprisingly little effort, which is usually my job. Once a sufficient quantity of this flour has been obtained, she mixes it with some water, a Mirelurk egg or two, and some honey from the colony of bees that discovered us last year and is now a thriving three colonies, thanks to the amount of pollination Bob's trees and all the other flowering plants in here seem to require. The resulting batter sometimes acquires some of the small blue berries (if there's a batch of them) that grow in droves in the northwest corner, on the vines that are climbing the cliff face there. She cooks this batter, along with some Mirelurk eggs, on a large flat sheet of metal that rests on an apparatus I built from stones and scrap metal that holds it over the firepit.

Sometimes I think we have it pretty good in here.

As I sit up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, Sapling Yew shows up, probably drawn by the smell of food. I think that child eats more than all of the rest of us put together. Without a pause in the rhythm of her food preparation, Maple puts a plate of food together for her. "Thank you," she says, politely, and takes a big bite. "Auntie Maple, these are _so good,_ what do you call them?"

This time, my love pauses. A brief look of consternation crosses her face. _Leave it to the young,_ I think to myself.

"Well, they're sort of like cakes, but they're flat…and they've got the blue berries in them…so let's just call them blue-berry flat-cakes, shall we?"

I stifle a chuckle. _Leave it to my love,_ I amend my previous statement. Nothing can faze her, not a vicious attack from a charging Mirelurk and not an impossible question from a precocious child.

My keen ears detect the approach of Cypress long before he comes into view, so I move over to claim my food before he gets here. His appetite is second to Yew's only slightly. "Two eggs for me, today, if you please, my love," I murmur in her ear, and punctuate it with a row of kisses on her neck. She likes that.

She wriggles with pleasure, half turns, reaches her free arm up and around me, grabs a handful of my hair and pulls it. Hard; sometimes she enjoys doing that, and sometimes she likes it more when I do it. She holds me just long enough to make her point, grinds her pelvis against my leg, kisses me thoroughly, puts her hand on my chest, and gives me a gentle shove. "Take that, oh mighty man who so enjoys arousing me at tremendously inappropriate moments," she says, jerking her head towards the fascinated Sapling Yew, who is so captivated by this scene that she is – astonishingly enough – letting her food get cold.

"You two disgust me," Branchtender Cypress announces, but with a broad grin on his rough features to let us know he's joking. He can be a blunt bastard, and in a community as small as ours, this can lead to unnecessary tension – meaning any tension at all – because he doesn't mean to offend.

"Oh, piss off with your unwarranted self-importance," my love replies, glancing at me to see if I get it. I wink back, ever so slightly.

"Piss off, piss off, piss off," giggles Yew around a mouthful of the food she's rediscovered.

A look of confusion has overtaken Cypress' friendly grin, causing him to close his mouth over his rather unfortunate set of teeth. "What do you mean by that?"

"We never spoke of you to anybody!" The two of us say this in unison, and burst out laughing. Cypress looks to Sapling Yew helplessly. She swallows her mouthful of food, sighs heavily, and explains.

"You said they disgust you, as in, provoke a sensation of distaste," she says. "That construct sounds extremely similar to the past tense of discuss, as in, to talk about. Therefore, they countered your joking insinuation by alleging that you do not compromise a subject of sufficient significance for them to engage in discourse concerning you."

Even though I'm responsible for certain aspects of her education, making me particularly answerable for the linguistic tricks she just baffled Cypress – and possibly my wife, which I glance at her to confirm, and indeed she is staring, eyes wide – with, it still amazes me how smart the kid can be when she turns it on. "If you understand the joke so well, why didn't you laugh?" asks Maple.

"Because it wasn't funny," she says, matter-of-factly. Cypress laughs at that, and Yew grins impudently.

I can feel my love starting to stiffen with indignation. "Well, maybe it wasn't funny after what you did to it," she begins. It's time for me to intervene. I can take the kid down a peg, and do so more constructively than Maple undoubtedly will.

"Easy, everybody, calm down, no need for everybody to get agitated this early in the day. Yew, sweetie, that was not too bad, but there were some things wrong with it. Any ideas?" She takes another big bite, nearly finishing what's left on her plate, and her eyes go distant as she chews and mentally reviews what she said. She swallows, takes the last bite, and puts the plate down with the rest of the dirty dishes. Her eyes snap back into focus; she looks at me and shakes her head.

"All right, then." I glance significantly at Maple; because she and I are a great team, she knows what I'm non-verbally saying, and starts getting my food together. "First of all, construct was redundant. It's one thing to be verbose, if a given situation can be improved by it; but generally speaking, it's better to keep your mouth shut. And if there's somebody there like me, who can pick apart your constructs – there's a correct example, incidentally – it's better not to have made the attempt."

Yew is already scuffing the ground with her toe, though she maintains eye contact with me. I accept a plate of food from my love and take a delicious bite before continuing. Cypress moves into line, all badinage forgotten, though I can tell he's paying attention too.

"Now, what other word did you use incorrectly? Oh, right. This is an easy mistake, because the words are so very similar, but they mean nothing alike. Compromise means a couple of different things, but usually it refers to when two people or parties make an agreement where they both get some of what they want or they pick the middle way between two extremes. The lesser-known definition is, well, here's an example. If Raiders were to learn the real location of this place, everybody's safety would be compromised. So what was the word you really wanted when you said Cypress didn't compromise a subject sufficiently significant?"

"I guess I should have said consist of," she says. "I just thought that was the word. Consist isn't super similar to compromise, though. What am I missing, Uncle Linden?" She gives me the ultra-serious look that always warms my heart and makes me wonder if Maple and I will ever create a child…in this Wasteland…no. Our reasons for not doing so remain valid. Besides, we have Yew.

"The word is comprise, sweetie. Don't you remember? Most Raider bands can terrorize much larger settlements, despite being comprised of only four to seven members."

"Comprise, oh, piss, I'm so stupid! Form or compose, be composed of, include or contain, or have as a component! Piss on it! Comprise!"

"Exactly," I tell her, unable to keep a note of pride from entering my voice. "As a reward," here I ignore my love suddenly swelling up with indignation, "you may help my wife wash up after everybody has finished with breakfast. This is also a punishment for gratuitously using lowbrow expressions. I know she did it, but that was part of the joke. Then you will report to Cypress for some weapons training whilst I guard the gate - which I will start doing now - presumably replacing our elders, who should not be out there for extended periods, which this has been." I turn my professorial stare on Cypress for a second, and he hastily swallows, nearly choking.

Smiling to myself, I turn and head off, checking to make sure I've got extra ammo clips for my Infiltrator. At the end of the glade, I turn my head to look at my love, who is staring after me. As soon as our eyes meet, she points at her eyes, then her heart, then at me.

"I love you too, baby," I call back. "With all of my heart, I do."


	11. Of Feral Dogs and Melancholy Folly

She comes to join me once everybody has more or less concluded the breakfast ritual to their satisfaction. I'm sitting on a rock in front of the main gate, staring into the sky, wondering what it must have looked like when it was blue.

What shade of blue, I wonder. I mean, we only know what the pre-war world was like from vague descriptions in what few books on the subject have survived. The thing is, nowhere is there to be found a detailed description of the sky because, let's face it, what purpose could it possibly serve? The sky is pretty much the universal shared human experience. Why belabor the obvious…?

…I mean, quite aside from the fact that people two hundred years later might have wanted to know because their sky is a uniform shade of fucking featureless monochromatic gray from morning until night, save for the burnished coin that is the sun. I read an old report once that some Scribe had managed to restore to nearly pristine condition; in it, the author asserted that skin cancer was a leading cause of death and listed several ways to prevent it, including limiting sun exposure.

Not a concern these days. I'd be surprised if we got even half the amount of ultraviolet they used to get before we fouled the atmosphere with the toxic smoke of war. Don't get me wrong; despite Rad-Away and Rad-X, cancer is endemic and probably kills more people than Raiders and malnutrition put together. Just not skin cancer.

I sigh and drop my eyes from the gray of the sky to the gray of the rocks, and she slips up behind me and starts rubbing my shoulders. "I sensed you," I tell her.

"You lie, my love. One point to me."

"I didn't call you out because I was thinking melancholy thoughts. But I knew you were there and I knew you were you, and not a threat to me."

"Nope. No way. No how. Not gonna fly. We started this game to heighten our awareness, and it was your idea, so don't go trying to excuse your lapse in concentration by saying you were thinking sad things. The game's always on, and you didn't sense me or didn't bother to call me out; either way. It's. A. Point. To. Me!"

I battle with myself for a few seconds and win; the resulting smile almost breaks my face, and I twist my head so she can see it.

"There we go! Melancholy folly over with? Yeah, that's it. You love me, by the way. I can always make you happy," she says. "I always will, too."

"I truly hope so, baby," I tell her. "If it's up to me at all, you definitely always will. No, don't stop. That hurts in such a lovely fashion."

"I can see why. Well, not see…I can feel why. You're as tense as Cypress. Not that I massage him, I just mean he always seems permanently high-strung. But you, your every muscle back here is just…mangled. Damn…"

She trails off, punctuating a now mental dialogue with occasional small noises of effort. I continue to melt under her ministrations. Not so much that my alertness lapses, of course, but I do allow myself to enjoy this pleasurable experience.

Wait a minute. Something she just said is resonating with me, some phrase…there it is. It is one of mine.

"Maple, when did you read my book?"

Her response, and the quickness of it, surprise me. Maybe she realized my mood had changed again because I tensed up more, or my tone of voice changed, or because I used her name - which I hardly ever do - but she doesn't hesitate, even for a second. "I read it all the time, baby. It makes me feel good when things go wrong or when I'm worried or even just…cold."

"Don't you think you should have asked me first? Didn't you think maybe there might be things in there I might not want you to read?"

Her tone carries genuine puzzlement. "No I don't, and no, I didn't. Baby, we are one. There's no privacy required, no secrets between us, nothing either of us can do that will make the other one so much as blink, let alone flee. If you're referencing your tortured scribbling regarding your Brotherhood ex-lover, that is part of me now too, just as she is. If you refer more to your torturous interior monologue that bemoans the loss of your innocence and some of the things you had to do as an Outcast, well, it's all us, my love."

Keeping her hands on my shoulders, she moves around to face me, and stares deep into my eyes in order to emphasize her point. "There is nothing you can do that will cause me to stop loving you."

I have to smile at her naivety. "You're such an innocent soul, my love. Believe me, there are things I could do that would make you stop."

She smiles right back, mocking the way I'm smiling at her. "I'm sure you think I'm terribly naïve. And yes, there are things that could be done to make me stop loving you, but _you couldn't do any of them._"

I open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out.

"She's got you there, son. She's seen your whole soul, all the way to the bottom. We both have, in fact; we just took different paths around it, so to speak." This from Bloomseer Poplar, who has just passed through the main gate and is trudging towards us, a hunting rifle slung over her shoulder and a brace of pistols strapped to her skinny old hips. It is becoming more and more apparent to me all the time that I live with a bunch of crazy people, and the fact that I enjoy it so much says more about me than it does about them. Having been placed so firmly…in my place, I shut my mouth and scan our surroundings again.

"What's with all the ordnance, Seer?"

As usual, my love has cut right through to the most important subject at hand. Well done, baby. What does Poplar think she's going to do, hunt down some Brahmin and carry them back herself? There's a pack of Yao Guai in the area. I point out as much.

"When you're through making assumptions about my intentions," snaps Poplar in response, "you may ask me – politely – what it is I'm doing with all these guns."

My love has moved back around to continue massaging me, so her back is turned to Poplar. "Seer, I most humbly apologize for my presumption _and_ that of my idiot husband. Please, won't you tell us what you intend to do with those weapons?" She certainly _sounds_ contrite; I think I'm the only person who knows her well enough to catch the barely suppressed laughter in her voice.

Poplar is either mollified by this or willing to pretend for the sake of peace…or to get what she wants, which she now reveals. "I'm given to understand that a pack of Yao Guai recently killed a Deathclaw not far from here. I'd appreciate it a great deal if your husband would escort me there briefly. Portions of the carcass would be…very useful to me, and the whole camp, by extension."

Maple and I proceed to have one of those conversations within a conversation that we're so good at, because we communicate so well.

"Baby?" _Translation: I have no objection, if you think it's safe._

"Mmmhmm, no, don't stop rubbing." _Translation: Yao Guai don't linger at their kill sites, they eat and move on. I don't mind, but do you think it's worthwhile?_

"Right there…this here is a big knot, I've got it. Brace yourself." _Translation: I think it might be. She's always coming up with bizarre ideas, predictions, and decrees, but she never steers us wrong. Besides, I'm pretty curious what she thinks she's going to brew up this time. Bring me back a claw, please?_

"I'll be feeling that tomorrow." _Translation: Definitely. Be back soon. Watch the gate; I don't think I need my armour for this so we may as well just go. Love you._

"Don't think it excuses you from any of the chores we're going to do." _Translation: Be careful. I love you too._

Maple concludes my massage and I stand up, stretch, and feel a great deal better. "All right, Seer, let's get going then. Judging from the sounds I heard, the remains should be just over that ridge just west of the mouth of the defile. Maybe a ten-minute walk, if we're lucky.

She falls into step with me as I lead off, keeping a professional two paces behind and one to the left. I'm impressed; I've given my love and Cypress the benefit of some of my military training, but I've never really worked with Poplar. We've only seen action together once, now that I think about it, when I escorted her and Birch over to the Republic of Dave in order to trade some things. She killed just as many Raiders as I did that day.

Okay, two, and hers had no ranged weapons. But she was a great deal more useful than Tree Father Birch.

Once we reach the end of the defile, I start to tell her to wait for a minute while I check out the area, but she's already hunkering down behind a large boulder that allows her a good vantage point of the valley spread out below us, as well as adequate cover, should I come running back with something chasing me.

Others might call it uncanny, the way she always seems to know what you're thinking, or what you're going to say next. They say she has the gift of precognition. They say she can see what's in store for you.

I just think she's a very clever old woman.

I nod to her as she checks the action on her hunting rifle and rests it on the boulder. "Well, go on, then, I'll wait right here while you go do your reconnaissance or whatever," she says.

I shake my head in bemusement and take stock of the surroundings, then move off cautiously, heading west. The Wasteland spreads out before me, parched and dusty ground for as far as the eye can see, broken only by the occasional dead and blackened tree, limbs like skeletal fingers beseeching the sky for mercy that isn't forthcoming. In the distance, parts of the elevated freeway still stand. The support pillars, by and large, are intact, and holding up sections of road, though most of the sections in between have fallen and are crumbling where they lay.

Every time I emerge from my green and verdant chrysalis, the starkness of this landscape succeeds in renewing my belief that whatever restorative power Harold possesses should be spread as far and fast as possible.

On the other hand, given the mess we've made of one civilization, and the widespread rampant corruption endemic to the remnants of this one, do we humans really deserve another chance to build and maybe destroy once more?

Not for me to judge, I suppose.

Around a particularly large boulder, I find the remains of the Deathclaw. It was, in fact, pretty close, and pretty easy to find. Unfortunately, I'd allowed myself to become preoccupied with my thoughts, and so I'm as surprised to see the feral dogs gnawing the bones as they are to see me.

They recover pretty quickly, though. The Yao Guai didn't leave them much meat – not that Deathclaws have much meat on them anyway – and so they are more than happy to drop whatever they've got and charge at the fresh meat I'm carrying on my bones.

This meat is not entirely defenseless, though. I may be surprised, but never let it be said that I'm slower than a starving animal. I put a three-round burst through the head of the nearest one, turn, and run for it. The remaining three charge after me. I hope Poplar is paying attention, because the silencer on my Infiltrator means she won't have heard me shooting.

She's paying attention. Her first bullet passes close enough to me that I feel the wind of its passing microseconds before hearing the sound of the shot. One of the feral dogs behind me starts making a terrible noise; must have been hit in the stomach.

When I'm running from something, I never look back. I just run as fast as I can and keep my attention focused on potential obstacles. If the thing pursuing is fast enough to catch me, then it is, and that's all. If it's not, there's no point in giving it an advantage by tripping over something I might have avoided. This has the drawback of leaving me clueless as to the enemy's position when it's time to turn and fight; on the other hand, I have some idea, because they're growling as they run.

I turn, acquire my target, and shoot; again, a three round burst shreds the creature's skull. The last one is too close, though, and it leaps for me. I throw myself flat, hoping Poplar can shoot it in time.

She does.

In the leg.

It flies over me, hits the ground with a yelp, gathers itself to launch into the air again, and realizes this won't work with one of its back legs destroyed, so it settles for dragging itself forward and sinking its teeth into my leg before I can bring my gun to bear on it. With a howl of pain, I shoot it in the head, but the sudden brain injury causes its jaw to convulse, further damaging me. I scream again and pass out.


	12. Excruciating Accretion

Pain awakens me. It is all-consuming, unrelenting, incapacitating. I think I may be saying these things aloud.

"You are; and rather too much aloud. Want to bring more of those things down on us while I'm patching you up? If so, keep babbling. I know there's pain. It's liable to be your constant companion for a while, so here, take this Med-X and jab it into your shoulder. Intramuscular injection of a thebaine-derived opioid painkiller should shut you up and render you functional while we complete our mission, and this Stimpack ought to heal the muscles enough to let you stand up."

Above me, the glimmering bronze disc of the sun is dimming to match the grey of the sky, which, in its turn, is fading to boundless blackness. The stars are closing in and fading away at the same time…

"You're going into shock. Inject yourself already!"

I thought I had. I line up the tip of the needle with the middle of my left deltoid, drive it in, and depress the plunger.

A moment later, the most benevolent feeling suffuses my body. It's like I'm being caressed by an angel, and I can almost take no notice of the pain in my leg.

"Yeah, it's great stuff. That one dose is all you get though; I don't need you getting sick on us. Besides, I don't have a lot. Now brace yourself. Despite the Med-X, this is still going to be somewhat unpleasant." I lift my head and see that she's tied off a tourniquet just above my knee. My femur prevented the dog's dying convulsions from taking a rather large chunk of muscle right off me, which was good, but some of my calf is ruined.

"Why the tourniquet?" I ask her.

"It helps prevent infection or potential blood poisoning from spreading," she says. "Stimpacks are wonderful at accelerating some parts of the healing process, but not all of them. We're lucky they weren't mole rats; those things have truly filthy mouths. Despite everything, dogs still have relatively cleaner mouths than humans. Remember that next time Maple wants to exercise her biting fetish, by the way."

I open my mouth to deny that my love harbors any such perversion, but stop when I see the way she's looking at me. "Excellent," she says, and uses the Stimpack on me. The wound is abruptly a flurry of activity, and a welter of frothy, bloody pus is ejected.

The pain is back, but I'm fascinated more than distressed by it. The Med-X allows me to ride over it somehow and be clinically fascinated by what is happening to my leg as the muscles knit themselves together.

My heart is beating so quickly that I can hardly breathe…but I feel fantastic. As the healing process slows down, still incomplete, I watch new skin start to make inroads on covering the injured tissue. This itches a great deal, which I ignore; I think Poplar would tear my arm off if I tried to touch the wound.

When the activity finally ceases, the muscles are significantly repaired and about half the skin rejuvenated; the rest of the injury is covered with a thick scab which Poplar pokes at gingerly. "All right, get up," she says. "I pronounce you operational. Just go a little easy on it – that means no more dives into the ground like you're sliding into second."

"Like I'm what into where now?" I start to ask her, but she's already shaking her head _never mind_ and heading off in the general direction of the carcass. I allow her to precede me for a few minutes while I test out the leg, which works adequately, and then I take point and she falls back into her cover position. We reach the corpse in a few minutes, which is just as the dogs left it.

"Hm," she says, walking all around it and studying it intently for several minutes and from a number of different vantage points. She even, with my help, clambers up onto the top of the boulder near the base of which the monster fell, in order to see the message to be read in the pattern of bone dispersal.

When she's done, she starts collecting all of its claws; I unsheathe my combat knife and assist her. Prying the huge claws off the joints they're firmly anchored to would be a lot harder if a number of different animals hadn't been chewing on the hands extensively.

"I thought Yao Guai always left the head and hands of their prey intact," I remark.

"That's lions, and it only applied to human prey," she replies. "Which are probably extinct by now – cats and dogs show very little potential for mutation, unlike bears, which Yao Guai are evolved from. Not that bears would have had much trouble surviving in a scavenger lifestyle. Dogs haven't either, but cats – not a chance. No big loss, the arrogant little shits. I wish there were more tame, trained dogs around, though. You can't sneak up on anybody who has a bond with a dog. Actually, that gives me an idea. Help me check the bodies of these mutts; we're done here."

Over my heated objection, she collects all the claws from me, saying she needs all of them for a while, and she'll do a better job of fixing one of them up for a gift than I could. She promises, in fact, to polish one, drill a hole through it, and hang it on a chain that will look quite fetching around Maple's neck, if I'll just let go of the thing and let her do what she needs to do with it. I concede, and go inspect dead canines.

We are in luck – or so Poplar decrees – I reserve judgment. The third one was a nursing mother; her teats are still full of milk. Poplar scavenges as much of this as she can while I look away.

It only takes us four hours, three dead Bloatflies, two dead mole rats and one more dead feral dog to find the den. There are three puppies in it, all tiny-sharp teeth and cute-ferocious growls and recently opened eyes.

"Don't you think your wife will be much happier with one of these little guys than a stupid claw on a necklace?" Poplar asks.

I have my doubts, but I don't voice them. As the sun begins its final descent, we head back to camp, carrying a dead Deathclaw's claws, and a dead dog's milk and puppies.

Not the most auspicious haul.

My leg hurts.


	13. The Sun Reveres the Mountaineers

"Baby! You're all right!"

Of course I'm all right. I'm better than all right. Why wouldn't I be?

"We heard you shooting…what's wrong with you? What did you do to him?"

Gunfire…of course there was gunfire. And you would have heard it, we were close by. We had to shoot them.

"Shoot who? What is wrong with you? This doesn't look so bad."

"I dosed him with painkillers and gave him a Stimpack. His leg was torn up a bit. You should apply another in the morning."

My leg is fine, just fine. Why is everybody so worried?

"Get him to bed, I'll take his shift on lookout."

Sleep would be fantastic right now. I hope my wife will snuggle with me.

"I'll hold you baby, don't worry. You're going to be just fine."

How does everybody hear what I'm thinking?

I try very hard to blank my thoughts, and find that all I can think of is pale, monochrome and gray, just like the landscape outside.

_The sky is gray, the rocks are gray, the crumbling yet still massive fragile concrete remnants of human civilization's construction projects are gray. The wind picks up gray dust from a gray alluvial plain and blows it around; some of it settles on gray buildings, gray dead trees, gray people, gray armour covering my vulnerable flesh, protecting the vibrant colours comprise on and in me from the bleakness of this all-gray world. Because of its all-encompassing nature, the word itself has now lost all meaning: gray, gray, gray. The only colour visible is a tiny fire, way off in the distance._

_As soon as I notice it, it draws nearer, spreading without seeming to, growing without fuel to feed it. The myriad colours it provides this dead landscape with are welcome, and yet ominous at the same time. It's like it's burning the grayness out of the landscape and replacing it with orange, yellow, red, a million shades of beckoning brightness, of welcome warmth in the endless cold gray night that is life in this Wasteland._

_This warmth and brightness will certainly consume me, should I succumb to temptation and let it overtake me. I turn my back on it and run. The power armour boosts my musculature, assisting my movements and sending me flying over the gray world being consumed by fire behind me._

"_Linden!"_

_My wife is calling me. I heave a sigh of relief; I don't know how we got separated, but we'll be reunited soon. I alter course slightly, and then a second time as I hear her call my name again. The fire is off to my left now, and I'm running parallel to it. "Linden," I hear a third time, and with a sick feeling, I realize it's coming from somewhere behind the wall of flames._

"_Save yourself, my love," she cries to me. "I'm burning, but you can still be free. Avenge me if you wish, but survive in order to keep my memory alive. Live to keep me alive!" Her voice is growing fainter; it's barely audible over the roar of the flames now._

"_How can I live without you?" I shout back. "I don't want to!"_

"_You have to…" her voice fades away entirely as I try in vain to catch one last glimpse of her. The flames burn higher, hotter, and now the heat dispersal system built into my armour is having trouble compensating. I break into a sweat, which the smart fabric of the interior lining whisks away into the water recycling unit to be purified and delivered to my mouth via the nozzle extruded by the helmet._

_A tiny blinking bar on my HUD indicates that the armour's water reservoir is now full. I turn my head slightly, try and fail to grab the water nozzle. I turn my head as far as it can go, and try again. _

_I fail again. Now that it's so close and yet so far, I find my thirst is growing, becoming all-consuming, like it's a part of me that will not be denied, thirst burning me up like the fire behind me devouring the land._

_I try a third time to grab the nozzle, and this time, it finds my mouth almost without effort. Weakly, I laugh with relief, and suck back precious life-giving water._

_It's warm, and thicker than it should be. The taste is somehow familiar, from a time long ago when…something happened to my nose…an unarmed super mutant had hit me in the face, and blood ran into the back of my throat and I had to keep swallowing it to avoid choking…_

_It's definitely blood. A wave of nausea rolls through me, and _suddenly I'm awake.

I take quick stock of my physical status. I think I'm…no, I'm definitely still nauseous. Lying down usually helps me avoid throwing up, which is something I hate, so I lie very still and look up at the sky, which is telling me that it's very early in the morning. Another wave of nausea overcomes me, and I suddenly realize there's no option here. I just barely manage to get myself disentangled from Maple and away from our bed before I'm down on all fours, heaving my guts out.

"No, don't get up, baby, I'll be okay," I say to her between spasms, as I see her starting to get out of our nest of blankets. "Poplar warned me this might happen."

"You're coherent," is all she replies.

"Yeah. I still feel high, but not like before. Do you think we should apply that other Stimpack now, that she recommended?"

"Why not? Bring it here, when you're finished being sick, you poor boy. There's water in the canteen over there for you to rinse your mouth, because Poplar warned me, too."

"What a woman. I think I'm done." I rinse my mouth out, grab the Stimpack, and crawl back to my love. She sits up and pulls back the blankets covering the injured part of my leg. As the Stimpack is injected, there is fresh pain. I inhale sharply, and she squeezes my hand. "Distract me, please," I ask of her.

She speaks instantly. "Why won't you tell me…or anybody, I suppose…your real name?"

I guess she'd been thinking about this for some time. It's a good thing I have as well. "My old name, you mean, and the simple answer is that it no longer applies. Whatever name I had before I came here isn't part of me anymore. Linden is my name, just as Maple is yours. We take the names of the trees in order to attest to our affinity for and our pledge to protect them, right?"

"I suppose. Will you ever tell me someday…what it used to be? Promise?"

"Maybe, baby. I promise."

"You promise maybe."

"I do. I promise to consider it thoroughly."

She sighs. "You know, this isn't especially the best subject for levity. But if that's the best I'm gonna get, then it is, I suppose. I just think…well, you know, I've read your book, and even though you got upset about that, you could see that I'm right and that it didn't change how I feel about you and that it's good for us to have no secrets from each other. Now, this isn't the kind of thing that could break us in any way, but it's still a secret, so I just think…" She trails off, frowning.

I run a finger down her cheek, reach down and cup a perfect breast. She smiles wanly. "That's my girl. A frown like that doesn't belong on your pretty face. Listen, my love, if it was important, I'd tell you, but it's not, it really doesn't matter. Now listen, speaking of my book, did you read the new poem I wrote the other night?"

She brightens up considerably more at this. "You did? Really? I didn't. Can I now? Please?"

I move my hand on her breast very slightly, in a way I know will tantalize without tickling. "Well, you know my fee for a poetry reading."

She seems surprised. "Really? You want to exact that price from me now?"

"Yeah, baby, why wouldn't I?"

"I'm not really certain; it's something to do with Med-X. Poplar said you might not want to for a day or two." She reaches down. "Ah. I think maybe your brain does but your body hasn't gotten the memo."

"Give me a minute." I lay back and think about her, watching her beautiful nakedness as she rummages around in our pile of discarded clothing, looking for my book. I think of how she looks as she rises above me, riding me, chasing her pleasure. I think of how she looks up at me, her eyes smiling even as her mouth is occupied, pleasing me. I think of the look of startled joy she has just about every time I enter her, and I wonder if I make a similar face. I think of the way she was burning in my dream just now.

That's not right.

I reach down, knowing what I'm going to find but dreading it anyway. Was it the vividness of the dream that has me semi-unmanned? Is it my injury, the stress of the day? Or is it, as Poplar said, the Med-X? Whatever the reason, I'm not fully there.

Maple is paying no attention to my dilemma, seeming fully engrossed in the poem. "Weight of the wasteland on our shoulders," she mutters to herself, a small smile playing about her lips.

"Feel like taking dictation?" I ask her a moment later. Instantly, she scrambles for the pencil, finds it, opens to a new page and waits, eyes fixed on me. I wonder if she was even finished reading. I wonder what I did to deserve her, this wonderful woman who loves me so exuberantly. I close my eyes and begin.

_Daybreak on the mountain; sun reveres the mountaineers  
the hunters and the hunted one are joined by foreign fears  
matched in impatience for the finish; resolute to persevere  
as the sun reveals their toil, all else seems to disappear  
the prey's a pretty lady, sleek of muscle, skin and hair  
some say her name is well known, others claim she's unaware  
in the undergrowth she crouches, trying quickly to prepare  
the life she's led til now has been in constant disrepair  
some say her flaw's compulsiveness but others claim it's lust  
her secret lover's her superior; her secret soul is dust  
the hunters stalking pattern shows their mutual mistrust  
which means that they don't stand a chance cause she'll do what she must_

Wordlessly, I reach for the book and she hands it to me, tears welling up in her eyes. She's always affected by this, when I involve her in an act of creation. I read it back, and marvel at how simple it looks, twelve rhymed lines on the page in Maple's beautiful, practical handwriting. With all the revisions and the back-and-forth between us, it took much longer than it looks like it took. The sun is well up in the sky now.

A smile leaps to my lips as I read the line she appended to the end.

_If you see her, tell her I mean no harm._

**The Sun Reveres the Mountaineers is a song taking shape by my band. Some of the poems I put in here are just poems I've written, others are actual song lyrics. If I happen to use a song that's actually complete and recorded, I'll put it up on the 'net and post a link if anybody's interested. But we're really just still in the formative stage, writing songs, auditioning bassists...so far, though, we sound like India Arie meets System of a Down.  
**


	14. Dreaming of Dunyazade

The next day, we begin training the puppies.

I say 'we' but what I really mean is that I join the oldest and youngest members of our family in having a daily session of bonding with the little beasts. Poplar insists.

I'm not sure why. I don't think I showed even slightly more interest in them than any other adult in Oasis; that is to say, any. The actual reactions range from completely indifferent – Cypress – to insistence that this is a bad idea – Leaf Mother Laurel – though her reaction might be precipitated by the fact that her daughter is obsessed with the puppies, and one of them, the male, clearly returns her affection. I guess what happened was, I handed him off to Yew while high on Med-X and being led off to bed, and he imprinted on her when she squealed with delight for about six hours. By such unassuming actions are our lives shaped.

She's named him Deathjaw, as his only other obsession is with one of the Deathclaw bones, which he carries around endlessly, following her. In this, he's already declared his independence from his sisters, and displayed phenomenal endurance. I don't think I myself could keep up with Yew on her daily cycle of perpetual motion, and though he has twice as many limbs, they're five times shorter than hers.

Poplar says they're older than we initially thought when we discovered them; they were small due to being malnourished and infested with parasites, which she wiped out of their systems with a special tea she brewed up from different sources. Though I share knowledge of certain remedies, I will never understand most aspects of her herb lore – for example, why the bark of one tree has to go in fresh and have boiling water poured onto it, while the other type of bark has to be dried first and crumbled slowly into the drink – nor am I able to figure out how she came by such knowledge, but it's damned useful. She made Yew drink some of the anti-parasite tea too, as Yew allows Deathjaw to lick her face far too much.

Then there are the sisters. Scheherazade and Dunyazade are their names, courtesy of Poplar. They are as unlike him as they are like each other. They are serene while he is agitated, smooth-furred where he is shaggy, obedient where he is anarchic, focused while he is demented, and they actually seem to be somewhat observant, reacting in interesting ways to various stimuli presented by their surroundings and our training methods, while he seems to be mostly oblivious to just about everything around him, save for things that strike him as edible, threatening, or both.

When I say the sisters react in various ways, well, here's an example. Most of the day has gone by very pleasantly, and productively, in terms of their training, and I think Poplar's finally going to announce that we stop for dinner, when I realize that Dunyazade has been keeping herself positioned directly between me and Deathjaw, all the time.

"She's protecting me from him," I say abruptly, and point. She lets out a slight whuf – of affirmation? – and flops down, exposing her belly in a move which she's discovered guarantees that I, sucker that I am, will rub it. Poplar raises an eyebrow at me, I nod, and she sighs deeply and happily with this revelation, but I make a mental note to ask her why she's hiding such a haunted look from everybody. In the meantime… "Poplar? Listen, I have to say that initially, I thought this was pretty far from the top of your list of good ideas. But these dogs are fucking _smart; _especially Duney. Good call on finding and retrieving them. Thank you."

"You poor, monumentally unprepared child," she replies. "When the chrysalis opens, you'll need her; more than you can possibly imagine. You're quite sure she's the one for you?"

I study the panting little furball, who is, in her turn, guardedly watching Deathjaw avidly pursue his mistress around the clearing. The three of them are all brindle puppies, primarily gray with white and black highlights, and hints of brown around their necks and legs. The wan light of the setting sun makes the gray in their coats look almost dingy, but as Dunyazade edges towards the subject of her careful stalk, her sister pounces on her, and the two of them roll around in the grass. Seeing this, Deathjaw bounds clumsily over and hurls himself into the melee. Mock growls sound forth almost alarmingly.

Only somebody who's been studying the puppies all day could tell them apart at this point. But my Duney has flashes of bright silver as well as the basic pattern. She is, if possible, even more regal than her siblings. "She is. I'm sure. Now what the hell do you mean by that comment about a chrysalis? Have you been reading my book too? Have you and Maple been talking about me? Why do I need a dog, as opposed, to, say, Cypress?"

She smiles at me. "Poor boy," she says again. Something in my look must betray my frustration, because she continues, hurriedly. "I know you don't believe in premonition…destiny…any of that, but there are, in fact, more things in this world than your philosophy imagines, to paraphrase the Bard."

"Paraphrasing makes him more coherent," chimes in Eavesdropper Yew.

"One extra chore for you tonight, girlie, for deliberately listening to a conversation you're not a part of. Now Linden, listen carefully. I have dreams about things that will probably happen."

"Probably happen," I echo.

"Yes. The future isn't fixed in stone, but there are events that have a high probability, and sometimes I dream of them. And sometimes I have a strong feeling of déjà vu, which means I dreamt of a situation and then forgot about it and then it almost happened or, depending on what it was, maybe I acted to stop it."

"Yeah, and maybe you're just a crazy old lady who has very vivid dreams."

She studies me for a moment. "Hummm, maybe. But please be careful. Now listen, do you know these dogs? Their names, I mean." I shake my head in the negative. "Oh, good, I love telling the story of the stories. So…many years ago, in the world even before the old world, when all it took to rule an empire was the ability to command more swords than your neighbours, there was a king who was a terrible misogynist. He hated women with such passion that he made a vow to marry a virgin every day, deflower her in the evening, and cut off her head in the morning."

"What." I don't even inflect the word with a questioning tone.

"You heard me."

"The people just stood for this? I mean, stood for it and sent their daughters off one after another to the palace to be married, knowing what would happen to them?" My tone betrays my skepticism.

"Like I said, he controlled the most swords in the area. Anyway, it came time for this girl, Scheherazade, and as always in such stories, she was very clever and charming and beautiful, but she was also a very talented storyteller. She was facing her turn on the altar, nuptial bed and chopping block, but she had a plan. After the wedding and the consummation, she started crying and telling the sultan that she had to tell her little sister Dunyazade a bedtime story. So they send for her sister, and she comes in and lies down on the foot of the bed and Scheherazade starts telling a story; and not just any story. Her narrative was epic. She told fables within legends within sagas, and she wove such a series of tales that they were up all night listening, and the sultan was so entranced that he spared her life just so she could finish the telling the next night."

"Let me guess," I say. "This went on for a while."

"It went on for a thousand and one nights."

"Why not just say almost three years…oh, never mind. So then by this point he'd fallen hopelessly in love with the princess, learned a valuable life lesson, married her, and become richer for having had the experience?"

"She wasn't a princess. Stop making fun of the legend. Some versions have it that she was the daughter of Shahryar's grand vizier, but I don't buy it, personally, because in the majority of the tales she told, the grand vizier was the villain of the piece, and I don't think she'd have wanted to stir up the sultan's paranoia against her dad like that. No, she was probably just a peasant girl, who'd otherwise have been doomed to spend the rest of her life trying to scratch a living from the desert."

"Like most of the Wastelanders out there, eh."

"I suppose so. What's your point?"

"Clever old hag."

"Insolent douchebag."

"Good night, Poplar."

"Aye." She watches me go, as I watch her, both of us to make sure that with no visible prompting from either of us, Duney rises, shakes herself, and heads off after me.

I find my wife in our own little clearing, heating up some Mirelurk-with-unknown-root-vegetable soup for our supper. Dunyazade romps over to her and squeaks with delight when Maple consents to pet her. I maintain my dignity and refrain from squeaking, though I do silently request similar affections. When it seems that they are not forthcoming, I clear my throat.

"I'm not sure you and my bitch have been formally introduced," I say. "Dunyazade, meet Maple." As I'm saying this, I'm already on my way to the ground to duck the improvised missile I'm sure is hurtling unerringly for my head.

I'm wrong. She didn't throw anything. She's still just sitting there, calmly stirring the soup with one hand and scratching Duney's ears with the other. "You're a silly husband, but I do love you, comments about my bitchy nature notwithstanding."

"Jokes. Comments imply truthfulness. It's a joke, and it's funny because you're not a bitch. She's my bitch."

"Yours, really?"

"She seems to have picked me, according to Poplar, and apparently this is a good thing. Do you know what her name means?" She shakes her head. "It means she's gonna lie at the foot of the bed while the king makes love. Come along, wench."

"My liege!"


	15. Visceral Evolution

**Freedom Note: I'd been wondering, lately, why I bothered to rate this M...or why there's a rating system in the first place, since so few seem to adhere to it...probably because it's fairly incoherent, irksome, unnecessary, possibly redundant, and who knows what else. I'm pretty sure I did it just to give myself leeway in case a chapter like this dumped itself out of my consciousness. I happen to quite like this chapter, however, because it's _usefully _explicit. Who wants to discuss with me the base tenets of this emergent philosophy?**

Dunyazade does not, in fact, lie at the foot of the bed; as it turns out, the puppy already has a more fully developed sense of dignity than you'd think. She lies down near the edge of the glade, halfway between the entrance and the bedroll we lay down on, kissing passionately. Facing away from us and the fire, she stares off into the gloom of late twilight under the trees.

We, on the other hand, have eyes only for each other, for the way the day's last, perfect light plays on our skin. We lick and kiss and touch and nibble and lick again, sending shivers up and down each other, raising gooseflesh and then smoothing it down again. Her breasts are perfect, no bigger than a pair of apples, with upturned nipples that are extremely sensitive to everything I do to them. I've always felt that more than a mouthful is a waste, and more than a handful is unappealing.

She moans, perhaps too loudly, and then giggles. Dunyazade twitches an ear in our direction as if to say, _silly apes, with all your pointless mating. _I pull off her pants and feel myself become fully tumescent. I reach down and confirm it, and her hand meets mine down there. With her other, she pushes me back.

"Lay back, baby. We don't do enough of this," she says, the laughter still in her voice. And then her mouth is full, and she swings a leg over my face, and so is mine.

I love the taste of my love. Yes, I've been with enough women to compare. I'm not ill-favoured, and sometimes, some places in the Wasteland, even mediocre good looks are enough to turn heads. Also, I have an affinity for women. I like women better than men in nearly every circumstance you can think of, but on the other hand, I don't treat them any differently. I'm the same guy no matter what the gender of the person I'm addressing, and I think that gets noticed and appreciated. Some guys are completely insincere around women, and it shows, mostly…more or less.

Once, I had a relationship with a woman who smoked cigarettes, when she could scrounge them. She tasted the worst. Everybody else has their own unique flavor, ranging from subtle to strong. Maple is on the subtle end of that spectrum. I think the fact that she's only ever been with me has something to do with it; that, and the fact that we're healthier here than any Wastelander has any right to be.

Her breathing quickens as I lick her from underneath, grabbing her right hip and left breast just to further stimulate her. She's so excited now that she can barely keep a steady rhythm going; so, with a growl of frustration, she gets off me, spins around, gets back on, and engulfs me.

Oh, the feeling of being inside somebody you truly love. I will state this point as fact and argue it to the day I die: to transcend mere sexual activity and move into the visceral realm of true lovemaking, there is no finer sensation. Sex is never _merely_ anything, even when it's performed strictly as a form of friendly exercise. No, indeed; I maintain it's the meaning of life.

Heh, got you. It's the meaning of life as it exists on a purely physical level. It is the _raison d'etre _only for the meat machines that comprise our corporeal forms.

The other portions of that discussion must wait, as I am currently focused solely on Maple moving above me, embracing me within her magical mucilaginous madness. Her striking green eyes are locked on mine, holding them captive, her left hand is clasping my right, and with her right, she rubs herself just above the point where we're joined. I let her set the pace and carry us away. We are such a well-matched, talented team – both in bed and out of it – that it's a rare occasion when we don't climax together, and today is no exception.

I let my pleasure build slowly, forcing her to come twice from the clitoral stimulation, and then with a sudden deft twist, I flip us over, never leaving her warmth. I angle my thrusts carefully, so as to provide the maximum sensation to a certain portion just inside of her, and then, suddenly, she screams, throws her head back and then forward, bites my neck _hard, _and ejaculates, her vagina clenching rhythmically, pulling my own sudden blissful release deep into her.

If there is another reason for these bodies to exist and function in the particular way that they do, please present a case for it. I'll listen, but I'll probably still maintain that sex like this – which is only possible with somebody with whom you share a genuine passionate love – is the only reason for our material forms.

Spent and sweaty, we lie there enjoying the afterglow for I know not how long, until various discomforts begin to make themselves known: my neck and my right knee are hurting from being in awkward positions, and my left hand, trapped under her from when I reached down to grab her ass in order to thrust deeper, is now asleep, threatening the imminent sensation of pins and needles sticking into it.

Dunyazade makes a sound that cannot be properly categorized as a whine. It takes me several more minutes to get my brain back to an optimal level of functioning and realize what she was trying to tell us was this: S_illy fornicating apes. Now your soup is burned._


End file.
